Not a manifesto
The web is one of the finest inventions of humanity. It connects people and is a canvas for creativity and innovation. The web is only thirty-seven years old, not even middle-aged, but I believe it could live on for many generations still. This would be a very good thing, and our generation has an opportunity to help make it so.
The web, alive?
Like a human language, a technology is only alive if it is in active use, and it only survives by being passed on from one generation to the next. Every living language is constantly changing; it can become unrecognizable given enough time, but is no less alive for having changed. To say that the web could have a long future is not to imagine a perfectly preserved web fossil being studied by future historians long after the last </html> is written. Rather, it is to hope for the web to continuously evolve, to meet the challenges of every decade, to remain central to human affairs, small and large. Its value is in the utility it provides every hour and every day.
What web?
If the web might evolve to the point of being unrecognizable, what then is the thing that should live on? It is not just web technologies like HTML, CSS, or JS. All of these can be and are used outside the web.
A few different properties are often proposed as essential to the web:
- The humble URL (U for Universal, originally)
- Open standards with multiple implementations
- The lack of gatekeepers
I believe the last is the most significant. Although access is not very evenly distributed, in principle anybody with a bit of time and money can start a new publication or business, with no central authority. This is what allowed the explosive growth in the first place.
As an ideal, one might define the web as such:
- The web
- Open information system used by all of humanity.
This sounds like a lofty goal, but it’s not far from reality, as the web is for the most part open and in many societies the web is a necessary part of daily life.
So, long live the open information system system used by all of humanity! However the web may evolve, if it fits this definition then I wish it the best.
How long?
Håkon Wium Lie often says that the web will last 500 years and has used Gutenberg’s printing press as a point of reference. And that CSS written today may still be readable in 500 years. These are bold predictions for such a young technology, but I too think it’s possible.
Lindy’s law would give the web another thirty-seven years or so – hundreds of years would make the web an outlier. But the web clearly is an outlier. Not in terms of being unusually coherent, as it is full of mistakes that cannot be undone. And not in terms of capabilities, as a meta-platform cannot do much more than the underlying platforms. But it is an outlier in terms of openness and reach, both of which make it more resilient.
The conditions are in place for the web to live hundreds of years, and normatively I believe that it should.
What does it take?
The threats to the web have shifted over the years. IE6 almost created a monoculture and stagnation followed, until Firefox saved the day. Flash became so popular that it was effectively required, until mobile Safari saved the day. Then mobile apps became the new threat, followed by super app ecosystems with mini apps. Fast forward to the threat du jour, chat apps.
The point isn’t that the web will be alright, that we can relax and think long term. On the contrary, meeting the existential threat du jour must be a top priority; the web must remain relevant to normal people doing normal things. Like a language that falls out of use, regaining lost ground is very hard when something else has already taken its place.
This way of thinking can seem paranoid. The web is the most successful platform in the world, with billions of users, preinstalled on virtually every device. Need we obsess about threats? Like with all things, in moderation. We should not catastrophize every new challenge, but we should also not mistake success for invincibility.
A wonderful property of the web is that we don’t need to all agree about the threats and take collective action. Progress occurs when someone invests in an idea and proves that it has legs. Along the way there is always disagreement, and consensus is usually the final piece to complete puzzle.
Long live the web
This is not a manifesto, and not a confident prediction. It is in equal parts a gentle wish and a burning desire for the long term success of the web, one web used by all of humanity.
Those of us now working on the web are of the first or second generation. Let’s make it many more.